<h1>final project concept</h1>
<p> For the final project, I'm going to try and work with a collection that has a lot of
	meaning to me, but is probably one of the hardest collections for me to have a complete grasp on:
	a collection of my life.  I've always found that keeping track of all my life goals, motivations, etc.
	is quite hard to do when faced with the day to day realities of life, and often times things that
	I wish would be at the forefront of my attention end up getting swept under the rug in the interest
	of daily survival.</p>
<p> Goals, desires, motivations, whatever you want to call them, are all vitally important catalysts in
	everyones life. How many times have you remembered something important that you meant to get done
	a long time ago, but never got around to due to one reason or another.  Whether it's a small goal like
	going jogging twice a week, or something bigger like learning a foreign language, we've all had urges
	to do something to improve ourselves.  The gap I'm looking to cross with this project is that from
	inspiration to execution.  When goals, big or small, go unsatisfied for long enough, not only do we
	miss out on the original opportunity for improvement, but the cognitive dissonance they generate begins
	to wear away at your sense of self.</p>
<p> To accomplish this leap across the gap of (apathy | forgetfulness | busyness | whatever else), we must always
	keep the ideal of self-improvement at the highest level in our minds.  However, this ideal is often overshadowed by
	shorter term thinking which ensures we make it from day to day without tripping along the way.  Since our minds are
	so geared toward short-term, immediate thinking, we have to present this information about who we want to become
	to ourselves on a regular basis.  If you've ever known anyone who has quotes posted on their wall or next to their
	monitor, this is essentially what it entails.  The problem with quotes is that they are usually written by someone
	else, and not always as applicable as we'd like for our own lives.</p>
<p> The best way then to keep our own ideals close at hand might just be to quote ourselves.  This is precisely what I
	intend to do.</p>
<p> I want to develop a system that keeps track of the user's motivations, goals, desires, etc. and displays them in an 
	easily digestible format so that they can make better decisions on how to spend their time.</p>
<p> There are already several websites on the internet today, promising to do just that.  One of my personal favorites is
	<%= link_to '43 Things', 'http://www.43things.com/'%> a social site where users can share their life's dreams and
	aspirations with others, as well as learn from/for the communal experience.  This is a good concept, but it can
	certainly be taken a few steps further.  As the site stands today, there is no prioritization of goals, no feedback 
	mechanisms to help people actually achieve progress on them, and no linking of bigger goals to smaller, intermediate ones.
	It can almost be considered a place to share your pipe dreams, and watch as the truly motivated make real progress and
	blog about it.</p>
<p> The biggest problem i see is one of visualization.  If you were to actually use a website like this to find a good way
	to spend some extra time on a Saturday afternoon, you probably wont get very far.  Lifelong goals aren't achievable in
	a single day, and being the productivity obsessed nation we are, we define success as completion rather than progress.</p>
	
<p>All that said, my main goal for this project is to create a dynamically navigable framework for helping people actually
	make progress on big goals in their lives that would otherwise remain in stasis.</p>
	